Your generous
donations help keep
this site running.
Visa/MC/PayPal accepted.
I've always been confused why the media goes berserk about rating a president's "first 100 days," but then just stops counting after the first milestone. This, to a statistician, would be known as a "zero dimensional data array" -- one data point, to be exact. If you don't re-test the sample on a regular schedule, how are you supposed to compare it to anything?
But this year's season could produce a bumper crop of silly. The silly, it seems, is just bustin' out all over. And it's only the beginning of August, when our elected representatives all take off work for five weeks. Who knows how silly things are going to be by the end of the month?
Is yelling a smart political tactic? That's an abstract sort of question, but it's going to become more and more concrete in the next few weeks, because there appears to be a coordinated effort to use the tactic of shouting everyone down to disrupt "town hall" events by Democratic members of Congress in their home districts during the August recess. My question is whether this tactic is going to be effective or whether it has the possibility of backfiring.
We haven't run a really good contest in a while, so I thought we'd open up the betting on what the outcome of the healthcare reform push will likely be, rather than write yet another column of seething frustration at the lack of progress from our belovéd Congresscritters.
For a while now, I've been using the metaphor of a baseball game to describe the progress of healthcare reform legislation trundling its way through Congress. And I have to caution everyone, we are still in the middle innings of this "game" (no disrespect intended, I know it's a serious subject -- I'm just talking metaphorically here) Which means that, no matter what the bills look like when they come out of the recalcitrant House and Senate committees, there will still be a lot of fighting before this is all over. I say this not to discourage healthcare reform advocates, but to keep everyone focused on how far we have to go.
The White House has, of late, been quietly expressing a bit of confidence that the economy is going to pick up in the last two quarters of this year. They aren't shouting it from the rooftops, exactly, but they have been publicly predicting that the recession will officially be over in the next six months or so. Which raises the question -- since the Republicans have pretty much doubled down on Obama's failure, what are they going to do if the economy gets better next year? When the midterm congressional election season gets under way in full force, what are they going to run on if people are happy with Obama's policies at that point?
Before I begin with the serious stuff, I'd like to indulge in a little gratuitous media-bashing first. If that sort of thing isn't your cup of tea, just skip to the next section now. You have been warned.
But is their idea viable? Or would the unintended consequences be worse that what already exists, especially at the small, short-term-loan end of the scale? These are questions that bear some examination.
In a few hours from now, President Barack Obama will give a live press conference to the nation. This is part of a new and concerted media effort by the White House to make Obama much more visible in the debate on healthcare reform. But being visible is one thing, and showing leadership is another. Because President Obama has so far been unwilling to tackle the tough decisions on healthcare reform, at least not in public. And, as Obama is accusing his detractors of doing, this is nothing more than playing politics with the issue by avoiding personal political risk to himself. Disturbingly, Obama hasn't even been very good at this political cheerleading, although he has gotten better in the past few days.
Conservatives and corporate-owned Democrats are in a tizzy. The House is moving its version of healthcare reform forward, and it (gasp!) raises money by (double-gasp!) taxing rich folks. Not by very much, as these things go -- but you certainly wouldn't know that from hearing Republican politicians and their enablers in the news media. As far as they're concerned, Democrats are going to raise everyone's tax rates (yes, even YOURS!) until they rival Denmark's (complete with Fox News graphics, in case you missed the point). While the tactic is new, the strategy is an old one, and can be summed up as: "Who will stand up for the poor, poor millionaires and billionaires?"